Long time readers may remember the stupid contortions I had to go through in order to avoid giving the Geological Society copyright in my 2010 paper about the history of sauropod research, and how the Geol. Soc. nevertheless included a fraudulent claim of copyright ownership in the published version. The way I left it back in 2010, my wife, Fiona, was the copyright holder.

Nach einer öffentlichen Kommentierungsphase ist nun der umfangreiche Auftragsreport der Harvard Library zur Konvertierung von Journals zu Open Access online verfügbar: Solomon, David, J. Mikael Laakso, and Bo-Christer Björk (authors). Peter Suber (editor). 2016.

We’re delighted to announce that the Academy of Medical Sciences has joined Europe PMC as a new funder, bringing the total funders to 27. The Academy of Medical Sciences represents the diverse spectrum of medical science – from basic research through clinical application to healthcare delivery. Their mission is to promote medical science and its translation into benefits for society.

Im Rahmen des Projektes “DEAL – bundesweite Lizenzierung von Angeboten großer Wissenschaftsverlage” haben wissenschaftliche Einrichtungen in Deutschland jetzt begonnen einen nationalen Vertrag mit dem Verlagsgiganten Elsevier zu verhandeln.

Die Studie “Ökonomische Auswirkungen einer Bildungs- und Wissenschaftsschranke im Urheberrecht”, die im Auftrag des Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) von Justus Haucap, Ina Loebert, Gerald Spindler und Susanne Thorwarth erstellt wurde, ist jetzt online. Die Studie beziffert u. a. die Ausgaben der wissenschaftlichen Informationsversorgung für Bildung und Wissenschaft in Deutschland.

As predicted, the popular and useful Social Sciences repository SSRN, having been acquired by Elsevier, is now being destroyed.

At Disney World infancy ends at 3, or at least that is the age children have to start purchasing tickets. It seemed appropriate to celebrate our 4th birthday there. Or at least at the #ISMB16 Computational Biology meeting that was held this week at the Walt Disney World Resort.

A few months ago I got an email from Nathan Myers, who asked me: In many ways, I’m the wrong person to ask: I’ve never started a journal, OA or otherwise, nor even served on an editorial board. But, hey, I’m not one to let something like that stop me. So here’s what I told Nathan. I’m sure I missed a lot of important possibilities: please point them out in this comments. I’ll try to keep this post updated as the landscape changes.

Join the Open Data club. Every year we catch up with fellow enthusiasts of open data, open source and open science at BOSC, the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference that is a Special Interest Group of the ISCB’s annual ISMB conference. This year there is an interesting juxtaposition with the location, being held at the Disney World resort in Orlando.

**Shallow Impact. Tis the season. **In case people didn’t know— the world of scientific publishing has seasons: There is the Inundation season, which starts in November as authors rush to submit their papers before the end of year. Then there is the Recovery season beginning in January as editors come back from holidays to tackle the glut.